What is violet?
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The title comes from some lines in a poem called 'Colours' by Christina Rossetti:
What is violet? clouds are violet
In the summer twilight.
This is exactly how I have always perceived summer twilight: as violet clouds. Also in the mix are the calls of bats, which I used to be able to hear. This memory blends with the vaguely pre-Raphaelite sound of the lute into a velvety historical scene. The music is an 'unmeasured prelude': in other words, a piece that is fully notated but lacking a lot of rhythmic information and so encouraging a free-flowing and elaborated interpretation.
Compositional Process
Matthew Spring and I have worked together since the late 1970s when we attended the same university. I have always admired his musical abilities, historical knowledge and deeply practical approach to his profound hearing loss. He plays a vast array of musical instruments from the medieval and renaissance periods, but is also interested in performing contemporary music, and indeed composes and sings himself.
Matthew lost his hearing through meningitis as a child, though subsequent ear infections reduced what remained, and wears two hearing aids (bone anchored and a very old analogue aid). As with all deafness his hearing problems are unique - and he never knows how he is going to be hearing day to day. Tinnitus is a constant problem and he relies quite heavily on lip reading and positioning - being in the right place to communicate. His problems are much more to do with quality of sound - as with hearing aids he hears a lot but not always of good enough quality. Sound above middle c he hears well for pitch - but below this his pitch sensitivity declines.
When I began to think about a violet piece, two things came to mind. The first was the call of bats, and in particular the Noctule bat. These strange sputtering sonar-like utterances are so focused and detailed that they are fascinating to my ears. They also instantly evoke the colour violet, probably because they are associated with the crepuscular time of early evening. The second thing that came to mind was early music. I was interested in the viola d'amore, which was also once called the violetta marina. I also toyed with the idea of writing for theorbo.
As with the yellow piece, I found an old piece that I wrote several decades ago that was "coloured" violet and had that title. This was scored for the unlikely combination of four electric guitars and two bass guitars. I didn't particularly want to use that material directly, but it did provide me with a violet filter through which to pass some new ideas. Also, the plucked strings seemed right, so I dropped the viola d'amore. However, I was quite stuck as to how to proceed. The only thing to do was to talk to Matthew.
Two main things emerged from our conversation. The first was that it made much more sense to work with the lute, since that is Matthew's main instrument (he also wrote a major book about it) and it was neither as unavailable as the viola d'amore nor as limited as the theorbo, which is mainly an accompanying instrument. I had thought about getting him to multi-track himself, but that idea just vanished.
The second major revelation was the form of the Unmeasured Prelude. Now I guess I did already know about this form that was adopted in the 17th and 18th Centuries by composers such as Jean-Henri d'Anglebert and Louis Couperin. But Matthew's passing reference to it during our conversation fired my interest so I went off to investigate further. What I found was an approach to notation and composition that was utterly extraordinary and beautiful. The resulting free-flowing improvisatory performances that emerge from this wonderful notation were entrancing, but also they sounded to me just like the rapid and sputtering calls of the noctule bat!
I worked for many days on a short unmeasured prelude for lute entitled Noctule. The compositional challenge was to produce something that engaged with the 17/18th Century tradition without merely pastiching it, that retained the harmonic language and mood of the violet electric guitar piece while not reproducing any of its detail. Overriding all of that was the sound of the bat call. I named the piece Noctule.